(here's why our sky is still white...this fire is 100 miles from where I live. Remember, fires are mother nature's way of cleaning her forest floor, but the smoke is not very pleasant!)
Feeling the Heat of the Derby Fire
By Greg Lemon, 9-07-06 | |  |
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| | ABOVE: A plume rises from the Derby Mountain Fire Wednesday evening. BELOW: Local rancher Dan Rostad looks out at smoke blanketing Deer Creek. Photos by Greg Lemon |
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"Firefighters get used to smoke. They eat, sweat, hurt and laugh in its dingy blanket. But for people who aren’t firefighters, who live in the communities and on the land where firefighters work, smoke means bad things.
I drove to Big Timber from Hamilton on Tuesday and barely saw the mountains the entire trip. Montana is on fire and the long, hot summer is trying not to end. Valley inversions lay smoke along roads, rivers and towns. A long, hot summer is trying not to end.
I am used to smoke, though I’ve never really liked it. I was a firefighter and in fact haven’t been able to get away from the firelines for more than a decade – whether as a firefighter or a reporter. I’ve come to understand that as long as I live in this incredible country of mountains, high-country sage and lightning, I’ll never get away from it.
The Derby Fire started near Derby Mountain south of Big Timber on August 22. It started as a lightning strike, but grew fast, as lightning fires do when the hills they spark are blanketed with knee-high, bone-dry grass and brush. In the foothills of the Absaroka Mountains the dead trees are drier than kiln-cured lumber, dry enough to catch fire in a whisper and burn quick and hot until they are nothing but white ash.
The Big Timber Ranger District, like much of Montana, has barely seen a splash of rain since June. For nearly two months people murmured at grocery stores, gas stations and taverns about how dry it was and how a lightning storm would raise hell. But for much of the summer the lightning didn’t come and when it finally did, the woods were weak to resist it.
“One thing that all of us have a hard time getting our hands around as humans beings is that there are just things that are just bigger than we are,” said Bill Avey, District Ranger on the Big Timber Ranger District.
As Avey said these words Wednesday in a dusty fire camp on Bridger Creek, just off Interstate 90, 15 miles east of Big Timber, a massive smoke column was rising off of the Derby Fire several ridges to the south.
“We, in our lifetime, haven’t seen this kind of fire.”
The kind of fire he’s referring to is the kind that will turn on itself with a change of wind and roar down hills and canyons, across ridges and rivers only to spin around again with a shift in the breeze and plough back up valleys, through subdivisions, pastures, corrals and homes. It’s the kind of fire that will leave baby deer laying frozen in death, almost looking like peaceful gray statues if it wasn’t for the black ash under and around them.
It’s the kind of fire that turns precious winter range into dust and hopes of good fall grazing into red flame hundreds of feet tall.
On August 26, the Derby Fire was holding at about 17,500 acres. Four days later it had grown nearly tenfold to 156,000 acres. It forced ranchers, retirees and waitresses from their homes. It left most houses in tact, but consumed 26 others.
For much of the world, it's just another disaster on the television news, and not even such a terrible one that. No one has been killed, after all, and 26 houses is not even that many in the fat almanac human tragedy.
But for the communities around Big Timber, it’s a horror they could not have imagined.
Stories swirl around town of the fire’s force and of heroism.
“Did you hear about the elk herd that got burned up?”
“Janice’s teenage son, through all that smoke and fire, drove them out of their ranch. She said he went up there a boy and came back a man.”
There’s the rancher that drove his cattle through dark smoke popping hot with embers to a corral and safety -- but still lost about 90 percent of his rangeland for all the good it did him.
There are the pictures of people picking through rubble leftover after their homes were consumed. There are stories in newspapers of neighbors hauling homeless cattle to feedlots and other ranches.
For people who don’t live here, these tales will soon fade. But here around the Derby Fire, they will turn into legends, and last for decades.
While the stories of the fire and its painful wake bring you down, the stories of how people have stepped up to help neighbors make you proud.
Mark King, Sweet Grass County extension agent, said calls have come in from all over with people offering hay, range and help for the ranchers who’ve been burned out. The County Courthouse has been flooded with volunteers and food.
“I was born and raised here,” said Sweet Grass County Commissioner, Phil Hathaway. “You always know the people of Big Timber are going to help each other.”
When the upper Boulder River valley was evacuated earlier this week, neighbors were there again bringing horse trailers and muscle. There have been prayer services and community meetings. Not everyone is pleased about how the fire has gone, but everyone is thankful no one has been killed or seriously hurt...."
Next to follow, were all the elementary grades, walking. The theme of the Parade was "TV SHOWS". Some followed it, some didn't. Some were just too dang cute to be true!
Star Wars...
Cuties....
Playin' the blues...
Some are very spirited!(All these kids are in my 5th and 6th grade band!)
My favorite float (made by the Sophomores)
The Homecoming King and Queen candidates....starting with the Booster Club Babes............
Chuck and Nicole...
Ben, Kate, Ashley, Jackson....
